Various native speakers have flagged that using "logics" is not correct because "logic" is uncountable. I have conducted some research and have found very few instances of plural "logics" being used. However, "logics" seems correct according to some grammar sources:
1
-
If you see logic as "a logical system", then you can have many such systems (e.g. in mathematics). Otherwise, and much more commonly, logic is uncountable.– AndrewCommented Dec 13, 2022 at 7:05
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
As with most uncountable nouns, logic may be plural, if it refers to different kinds of logic.
There certainly are different kinds of logic that have been written about and used.
Whether different kinds of logic have been applied in this case I don't know; but there is something else at play here: the whole sentence has a kind of rhetorical flourish, and can be read as saying something like "even if there is more than one kind of incontestable logic that has been applied, they are still not adequate to account for sociological analyses". In this reading, the mere possibility of there being more than one kind of logic makes the sentence acceptable.
answered Dec 12, 2022 at 15:47
-
I certainly didn't realise that the different logics were distributed among the different analyses. If you want to make that clear, I suggest something like Sociological analyses do not rest on their respective incontestable logics. Except that that is even harder to read. Commented Dec 12, 2022 at 23:25
There are surely circumstances in which a plural form "logics" can be correct. One may refer to multiple theories of logic, for example.
Science has used different logics at different times.
There are other senses of "logic" in which it is a countable noun.
That said, in most uses "logic" is not countable, and a plural form is not appropriate. It is hard to be sure without more context, but in the quoted sentence it seems that "*logic *" is being used as a non-countable noun, and so then form should be "logic", not "logics".
answered Dec 12, 2022 at 15:40
-
@Samara That sort of thing is why I said that context will matter. In the context of a paragraph making that point, a plural form might well be appropriate. There is no hard and fast rule here. Commented Dec 12, 2022 at 15:54
-
@Samara It might well convey the same or a similar meaning, depending on the whole text. The use of the plural form might serve to emphasize the difference between the different logical bases of different analyses in a way that the singular form would not, but that emphasis might be supplied by the rest of the text. Commented Dec 12, 2022 at 16:00